Adults

Psychodynamic therapy focuses on helping clients gain self-awareness of their unconscious processes and understand how these processes were manifested in their past and present behaviors. Clients have the opportunity to examine unresolved conflicts with an attempt to process and heal from past experiences. The ultimate goal is to help clients reach their true self and achieve their desires without the manifestation of dysfunctional symptoms. We aim to have a client’s past no longer disturb their present, allowing them to continue forward in life and achieve a higher state of health and wellbeing.

Adlerian therapy includes cognitive, behavioral, and experiential techniques, which are mainly utilized to help clients identify and change unhealthy beliefs about their self, others, and life. Through treatment, clients examine the early-in-life causes of self-defeating life goals, recognize the impact of their current behaviors in their life, identify self-defining goals towards a healthy style of life, and identify socially useful goals that may include; fostering social interest, overcoming feelings of discouragement, changing faulty motivation, restructuring mistaken assumptions, and achieving a sense of equality with others.

Existential therapy goal consists of assisting clients on the search of achieving a meaningful existence and helping clients assume responsibility for their actions in order to achieve their maximum potential. Through self-awareness, clients recognize the factors that are blocking them. They further recognize faulty cognitions and start identifying what they are doing that is contributing to their current circumstances. They get to know and accept themselves, widen their perspective on choices, and accept the responsibility of taking action. This approach can be useful for clients who are experiencing difficult life circumstances such as; career or marital failure, retirement, dealing with grief, transition to a different life stage, substance use, anxiety, depression, anger, and resentment. The ultimate goal is to expand awareness of what clients are experiencing in the present moment and encourage clients to identify purpose through life-enhancing behavioral experiences.

In an atmosphere of understanding and acceptance, clients grow, achieve self-explore, self-understand, gain insight, and heal through artistic forms, such as arts, writing, drama, music, dance, and meditation. This approach integrates mind, body, emotions, and spiritual sources to identify inner conflict, processes, and to achieve emotional healing. Through the expressive arts, clients awaken their individual creativity, imaginative abilities, logical thinking, and their world of emotions which leads them into their unconscious. This usually allows clients to bring light to unknown information and awareness, which eventually leads them to take action in their lives in a constructive manner.

The main goals through behavioral therapy is to help clients increase personal choice and create new effective behavior patterns. The main techniques utilized in this model provide conditions of learning that may benefit clients, such as relaxation methods, systematic desensitization, exposure techniques, social skills trainings, self-modification techniques, meditation, mindfulness, exploring spirituality acceptance, reality therapy techniques, and solution-focused techniques. These techniques may be useful to clients that desire behavioral changes. Behavioral therapy has shown to be effective with clients presenting phobic disorders, social fears, depression, anxiety disorders, substance use, trauma, pain management, eating disorders, and pain management.

The goal of cognitive behavioral therapy consists of helping clients become aware of their automatic thoughts. This assists clients in figuring out their core beliefs and beginning the process of schema restructuring, which will eventually help improve or change the way people feel and behave. Clients learn to identify their misconceptions and gain awareness of healthier ways of thinking. The process consists of becoming aware, then acquiring skills, and eventually, applying them. The idea is for clients to identify healthy ways to respond to stressful situations, identify positive self-statements, and practice relaxation methods. This method may be effective in treating depression, anxiety, PTSD, managing stress, parent training, eating disorders, and substance use.

Mindful meditation is a self-awareness practice that is used in treatment to help clients become more aware of their present emotions and thoughts without pushing them away. The purpose is to change the relationship with the distressing sensations via mindfulness and meditation techniques. Clients learn to respond to life situations in a healthier manner as they develop a routine meditation practice and implement it when feeling distressed. The idea is to break unhealthy patterns of thought, so clients can ultimately increase positive emotions and achieve stability.